Local Action Toolkit

Defra’s Local Action Project aims to work with local communities to enhance the value of natural capital in towns, cities and other urban spaces to improve people’s lives, the environment andeconomic prosperity. It takes a partnership approach enabling local communities and groups to develop a vision for where they live and to help them to form effective stakeholder-partnerships that work towards that goal.

As part of the LAP, a framework for the assessment of costs and benefits of catchment management programmes in urban landscapes was been developed. Information gathered has been used to develop a framework for the quantification of benefits resulting from interventions designed to enhance ecosystem service provision or mitigate loss of provision in urban landscapes. This framework is scalable, to ensure that it can be applied to a broad spectrum of urban situations, and includes a widely applicable series of metrics that allow all potential benefits to be measured (whether monetisable value or not).

Vote for your favourite project!

The Scottish Awards for Quality in Planning are one of the Government’s most prestigious awards. They celebrate achievements in planning, right from the detail of processing through to the bigger picture of creating places which will become the legacy of our professionalism.

From now until late September, everyone has a chance to help select the winners of the Peoples Choice Award. This award allows anyone to vote for their favourite shortlisted SAQP entry. The idea is that this Award gives everyone a chance to get involved and express their support for whatever they consider to have been a great project in 2018.

Mental Health and Green Infrastructure

A new task-force at the University of Surrey called the ‘Green Infrastructure and Health Mapping Alliance of Surrey Academics’ (GREENMASS), will see academics from a range of disciplines use their combined knowledge and expertise to explore whether green initiatives actually make a difference to wellbeing.

Guildford will be used as the initial pilot study area, but it is hoped that GREENMASS will grow to surrounding towns and cities. The team’s aim is to develop a new approach to linking green infrastructure to health outcomes. To read more, click here.

Greenspace benefits toolkit launched

SNH has published a report which describes how to map ecosystem services at a local, regional and national scale using existing and easily available land cover data.

Nine ecosystem services are covered (including soil carbon storage, water purification, urban climate regulation, and accessible nature). It’s a technical step-by-step report describing the ecosystem services it covers, and how the mapping can be applied and used. To see the toolkit, click here.